Literary Heirs

Consider the literary magazine. Cloaked in pointy-headed obscurity, it almost always loses money. And now, with printed media on the endangered list, it may seem especially at risk to go extinct (or online-only). But these scrappy journals are actually enjoying something of a renaissance in print, buoyed by on-demand publishers like Lulu and CreateSpace — which make them cheaper than ever to produce — and print fetishists who treat them like sacred art objects. (Some, like the hand-bound, screen-printed Birkensnake, undoubtedly are.) Travis Kurowski, who covers lit mags on his blog, Luna Park Review, estimates that there are now as many as 2,800 magazines. What distinguishes these 10 is that they’re not only intello-chic statements for your side table. They’re also really good reads.

2. Abe’s Penny (abespenny.com, $50 for six months) serializes itty-bitty stories as postcards sent weekly through the mail.

3. A Public Space (apublicspace.org, $12) recently asked a new novelist (Teju Cole) to photograph the area around Ground Zero and printed a memoir by a design legend (Eva Zeisel) about her time in a Soviet prison.

4. The Coffin Factory (thecoffinfactory.com, $9) made a splash in its first issue with work by Joyce Carol Oates and Milan Kundera.